Arbitrary Marks

In his 1998 paper, “Language within Our Grasp”, Arbib and his co-author, Giacomo Rizolatti argue that Broca’s area (implicated in human language capabilities) contain mirror neuron systems which are used in gesture recognition. A similar mirror nueron system in monkeys (in what’s called area F5) functions in the same way. Arbib and Rizolatti’s claim, when it comes to language, is that “such an observation/execution matching system provides a necessary bridge from ‘doing’ to ‘communicating’,as the link between actor and observer becomes a link between the sender and the receiver of each message.”

Thus recognizing actions and imitation (and only later on, communication) are the primary building blocks for language, not an innate Chomskian Universal language.

A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tries to isolate innate characteristics of the brains of homosexual men and women. Earlier studies have focused on parts of the brain which are more or less plastic–that is, they have to do with perception or reproduction, behaviors that may reinforce structural [...]

I have an instinct that (theistic) theological studies are far less useful than philosophy. As an atheist and non-Christian, to me it is like spending years studying the properties of phlogiston.

However, there are fellow philosophers spending years working on problems I think are wrong-headed. So is there any larger distinction to make between theology and philosophy, or, as human exercises in reflection, are they equally valuable?

I’ve been reading Patricia Churchland’s classic intro text, Neurophilosophy, in the evening (alternating between that and the Thomas Covenant series). While I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone–she gets really thick into details which obscure some of the take-away for the generalist–the most recent chapter I read on neuropsychology was tremendously useful.
Take the current media craze [...]

I don’t have time this morning to delve more deeply into it, but I will: an article by Francisca Cho and Richard K. Squier in the latest Journal of the American Academy of Religion is guilty of what amounts to creationist quote mining. I doubt that was their intention, but in “He Blinded Me with Science,” the [...]

[contemplative science] In all of these posts on the MMK (Mulamadhyamakārikā), I’m using Jay Garfield’s translation and commentary. That means that I’m not presenting all of the hermeneutic debates, but this version is what I have at a hand.

Earlier, I stated that “causation requires space-time coordinates in order to be intelligible. We need some way of distinguishing between the cause and the effect, and some way of explaining how the cause “picks out” this effect over another.” This attempt to isolate cause and effect is what motivates Nāgārjuna to posit what he calls “emptiness.” Emptiness is not “nothingness”, but rather the dependent origination of all things. At bottom, reality is–to put it using current buzzwords–relational.

In Chapter VII of the MMK, Nāgārjuna discusses the relationship between the agent and the action. We could understand this as the cause and the effect, too, since the same basic argument applies.

Dialectically, Nāgārjuna’s opponents were the Buddhists who admitted that the external world was empty, but wanted to suggest that, at the very least, agents existed. We need a subject to perceive that the world is empty, after all.

Nāgārjuna rejects this approach, claiming that everything, including agents, is empty. Here’s how the argument goes:

If you haven’t listened to the NPR story about two boys who feel like girls and whose parents are responding in divergent ways, go do it now. Forget Thomas Beatie and the hype over a pregnant man and instead consider the choices families must make when their child ask to play with ther opposite-sex sibling’s [...]

After seeing countless blog entries about Expelled, I finally decided to watch the film for myself. I’d seen posts taking the movie to pieces but purposely refrained from reading them–except for the ones about the PZ Myers/Richard Dawkins debacle. Since I often wind up somewhere in the middle on many science-religion debates, I wanted to [...]

I just got back from watching Expelled at a local movie theater, along with seven other people. Hey, it’s Tuesday afternoon. Watch for a detailed synopsis and review later in the week. Right now, I can say this: It’s a well-done propaganda piece that culminates in a rousing call for freedom. Unfortunately, the film has [...]

For anyone who hasn’t heard the news, a transman named Thomas Beatie is pregnant. I read about the news first in The Advocate, but it seems the story has spread to mainstream media, including Oprah. I’ve watched some clips from MSNBC and other news sources where anchors have made fun of the situation, remarking [...]